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In the spirit of the recent debate about The Creation as a place for criticism, I'm offering this little piece of sci-fi for your criticism and opinions. (I really shouldn't, not being a natural anglophile and all that, but...)
Ta.
Euphorbia Trigona
"Euphorbia Trigona", Malcolm Akhtonem said, when the noise
finally died down and we could hear ourselves again. The
past five minutes were a complete pandemonium, as the
shuttle's machinery hissed and clanked, complained and
moaned under the unimaginable pressure of the tunnel we
have been crossing.
The tunnel, we believed, was a worm-
hole, somehow made crossable. And cross it we did, yet
unwillingly. The shuttle's interior had resisted well to
the trip, but the signs of metal stress were everywhere.
Amazed as I was with the purpose of that ship (dimensional
leaps) and its appearance (looked like a batyscaphe from
the final of the 19th century - it had WOODEN parts, for
God's sake...), I took little time to consider its
resistance at such adverse conditions. From time to time
some of the pipes running along the walls would hiss and
expel gas, and a crackling noise of electrical discharges
was our background sound all the time. Were we safe, or
the "Munnim", named after one of Odin's crows (which served
him as his memory), was about to explode, leaving us stranded
in a distant... where were we, anyway?
Akhtonem was staring, eyes wide open and a smile in his face, to the
window, and his swarthy, alien/egyptian skin glowed in
excitement. "Euphorbia Trigona", he repeated. "I recognise
the system. There's Autor 3 and his twin star Denea. When I
joined him and looked to the direction he was staring at, I
could not refrain from shedding a tear, and I felt my skin tingling several times. I never felt such fear in all my two hundred
and thirty-two years, nor such awe, such humbleness, and
another feeling yet to be named. I was contemplating The
Numinous.
First of all, we were in space. Leaving alone
that, we could see, above our heads... the gigantic spiral
arms of a galaxy. Of Euphorbia Trigona. Slowly it moved,
with a grace unknown to me. With a texture that seemed
somewhat milky, velvet-like. And with a special glow,
majestic and delicate. Above our heads, like a god's eye.
It was the most beautiful (even though "beatiful"
does not applyed there) thing I've ever seen. In a moment
I knew exactly my place in the Universe. I stared at my
hands, trembling. Carbon, hydrogen, quarks, gluons...
energy. I knew we were going to die. We had little food and
water, but... I would talk to Malcolm. In the end, I wanted
to be release out there. I would join my sisters, the
stars.
Then he said: "I'm gonna make some coffee. This will
take a little while..." There was a smirk in his face, the
same I saw as we escaped, through bribery, the Maximum
Security Prison Koth Annun in his planet. "What?" I said,
yet shattered by all the things that had happened in the
last day. Being condemned to death in a distant planet,
escaping prison and stealing the dimensional shuttle,
having seen the interior of a worm-hole and being stranded
in distant space. One of the screens showed the platform
from where we departed. Guards, scientists and bureaucrats
walked to and fro, talked, then left. All too fast. As if
in a hyper-accelerated film, they were like blurs
in the screen. And the platform was... aging. Rust was
rapidly forming in the metal parts everywhere. The lights
died out. The camera stopped filming. "What?" I repeated,
feeling so, so numb. "Ironic, uh?", he said, as the coffee
heated in the plastig bags. "We were sentenced to death,
and now to the people who condemned us we are like
immortals." Then I understood what he was talking about. We
were near light-speed, and probably trapped in the gravity
field of one of the outer arms of the galaxy above. Near
light speed meant also that time would pass much faster
to... well to all the other living creatures in the
Universe than to us. Director Raksari was probably dead by
now, and so his sons, in a few minutes his grandsons...
yes, ironic. "What do we do now, Malcolm?" I asked. He
returned to the window and made himself comfortable. "To
them you're like a god now, man. Behave as one.", he said,
as he passed my coffee, eyes already fixed in the
unbelievable view we had before us. "Contemplate". |
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